One major change is you wouldn’t have people diagnosing themselves or seeking diagnosis as a way to signal their status/intersectional credentials. If (specifically young) people understood mental illness as the complex and often ugly thing that it is they wouldn’t glorify it so much. If you understand that mental illness can cause the type of irrational thinking that manifests in bigotry, then you probably wouldn’t have Kanye west on your podcast in hopes that you can “reason” with him and doing so would be as frowned upon as putting someone with a torn club foot on American Ninja Warrior. It would help us get less mad about the things Kanye says and have more compassion for him and his family. We would have better understanding of what mental illness is so that we can diagnose it better.
I can go on, but I think the implications to what Freddie is saying are actually really obvious.
Hmm I actually think you could be onto something lol. We are so annoyed “#loladhd” crowd that we feel the need to draw a straight line between them and the much more complicated high level issues regarding society and mental illness. We do this as a kind of defense mechanism by default because otherwise you’re just a petty old guy who thinks the kids are annoying, and no one wants to admit that lol. Kind of like people who compare the “pronouns” to Stalinism or w.e, it’s a lot more heroic to be opposing an evil tyrant than it is to admit you just think the idea of being trans is weird. Richard Hanania has an amazing article about this called “why I hate pronouns more than genocide” that I highly recommend regardless of politics.
So yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying here snd it probably wouldn’t change much for the people with actual serious mental illness. However I’d stand by that the current “#mentalhealth” discourse definitely has a lot of negative effects, specifically on kids and teens.
Hasn't the categorization been flipped? Decades ago autism by default meant significant disability and Asperger's was designated for "high functioning' individuals. Now the default seems to be Asperger's while the author of the linked piece has to advocate for a new "profound" classification.
You’re right Slaw, and I suspect it’s due to high functioning individuals having way more visibility in productive society. I completely disagree with the choice to remove the Asperger’s designation from DSM. I don’t think it has been good for anyone, and it causes a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.
I remember once, before I moved to the US, seeing a woman pushing a boy in a wheelchair. I say "seeing" - what actually happened is I heard the screaming first. This was in a wide open city square. The woman pushing her son (I assume) across it, and him just screaming to the heavens. This was in a huge plaza with hundreds of busy shoppers and tourists around, and it was loud enough then. God alone knows what it would have been like inside a small house. I'd never encountered profound autism before then (my friend told me that's probably what the kid had), so I went home and read up on it. It's utterly, utterly heartbreaking, the kind of thing that wrecks families. Autism being a spectrum, this is obviously the very severe end, but it puts the lie to the idea that it's a cuddly condition.
I have two cousins with, I guess, "severe autism." One is 34, the other 30, though I haven't seen them in years due to some family drama after their father (my mom's brother) died. Neither can speak or write more than a few words, and need help with basic functions of life, like brushing their teeth. They both were kept in public school until they were too old to be allowed, and they'll never be able to hold down a job. AFAIK neither had any friends, and I doubt any romantic connections. My one cousin was so prone to escaping the house (sans shoes, in the winter, in the dark, and unable to swim but attracted to moving bodies of water) that my grandparents had to change the locks in their house so all exterior doors could be locked from the inside, and someone had to carry the keys around on their arm when they visited. His brother is prone to hitting himself in the head when agitated (often, especially when people are talking loudly).
Just a wildly, wildly different experience than what Autism Twitter describes.
"Severe" is an imprecise statement on my part. I simply don't know what it's called. All I know is, people on the spectrum can live very happy and fulfilled lives, and their families the same, if they receive some accommodation. Other people, on the other extreme of the spectrum... I don't know what happiness means for them as individuals, but I do know that their condition presents an immense challenge for their families and as such I regard it as a very sad condition that, all else being equal, I would like people not to have. Many autistic people take offence at this opinion, but it's one that I stand by: at its worst, it's a condition that I think the individuals who have it, would be better off if they did not have it.
I have Aspergers and have friends with profoundly Autistic children.
One is something that can be ameliorated, causes substantial challenges, but isn't incompatible with a happy, productive, independent life.
The other is a life sucking nightmare for all involved that is not social media or real world cute, is not mildly life changing, and is not something that current accommodations measurably helps...
Modern social consciousness may help those with very mild Aspergers (sometimes) but offers little and/or is counterproductive for those further along the Spectrum.
The decision to kill the Aspergers category was done by the American Psychological/Psychiatric Society at an annual meeting. Science by vote is not science. The whole DSM was developed this way...
It can be morally correct that Kanye West suffered professional consequences for his behavior AND factually correct that this behavior was caused by his mental illness. That's why mental illness is an illness: because it can cause negative consequences for you!
If you're operating on materialist priors (which I think most people have internalized in the U.S. to some degree, particularly elites) I really don't see anywhere for culpability at all. There's your brain structure, and then there's outside stimuli, and nowhere is there a ghost in the machine to create free will. Some people have brain structures far outside of the norm, where they will have very atypical responses to typical stimuli. But even people who are completely "normal" folks who do bad things - like say someone who kills their spouse in a fit of jealous rage - are ultimately just living out the interaction between their neural states and the world around them.
That isn't to say that I don't think having the illusion of free will might be adaptive for a society as a whole. It's also not to say that there aren't some people who - regardless of culpability - need to be imprisoned for the safety of others. But the whole idea of assigning (or absolving) culpability just seems pointless to me. We have to deal with actions, not with intent.
I completely take your point. In a technical sense it's correct, based on those priors. But it's a disastrous social construct. Without the power of shame/blame to moderate it, there is ample - overwhelming - evidence - that humans can and will behave extremely badly. So it's a very bad idea to normalize that view. The idea of personal responsibility is the foundation stone of social actions. Crypto and the idea of trustless trust notwithstanding.
Hence why I said it "might be adaptive." I think that free will is a useful construct even though it likely doesn't exist in an objective sense. Essentially all human concepts don't exist in the objective sense anyway.
My point was more that putting a hard/fast division between the mentally ill (who are not culpable for their actions) and everyone else (who is) is pretty arbitrary. Hell, many of the most heinous crimes are undertaken by psychopaths, who are usually seen as criminally culpable, but it has increasingly been shown have a different neural structure and even when identified in childhood cannot be "reformed." Do I think many need to be locked away for the benefit of others? Absolutely! But the reason they are as they are is clearly not their "fault."
I mean, I agree insofar as that punishment is a silly idea for justice. It should be about being an effective deterrence or simply locking someone up who is dangerous. But even if there is no free-will ghost in the machine, there is a serious illusion of free will. And the belief that we have agency certainly shapes our response to stimulus, even if we don’t actually have any. I think free will is one of those things we don’t currently have the capacity to understand, kind of like how we can’t find a deterministic model for quantum physics. Unless someone can point me to some perfectly accurate deterministic model of the brain and human consciousness, I’m going to split the difference and assume we have free will with some constraints.
This argument only holds if you believe that the individual has no ability - to say nothing of responsibility - to moderate or otherwise reconsider their stimuli. Cognitive behavioral therapy, among other things, allows people to rewire the way they respond to certain situations. Free will is a completely separate argument to the one you think you're making.
I concede that you can rewire the brain over time. Hell, it's been shown that certain occupations can cause changes to your neural structure. But that doesn't mean that the initial decision to undertake said path was one where any alternate outcome was possible.
It's just external stimuli all the way down, then. If that one butterfly hadn't flapped its wings, I would never have started drinking.
It's the responsibility of an individual to not eat eight bags of sugar a day, despite the positive stimuli derived therefrom, and it's the responsibility of society to equip the individual with a knowledge of healthy eating and to provide the means for everyone to have a nourishing diet.
I mean, to give one example of this though, lots of studies looking at how to get in shape have concluded that people who are more physically fit over a longer term are primarily so because of how they are wired, not willpower. They get more of a "runners high" out of exercise than the average person, and find unhealthy food less attractive. They are not engaged in self-mortification, they are following their bliss same as the rest of us, it's just their bliss is much more adaptive to a healthy lifestyle.
Yes, some people are naturally equipped to od some things well, and some things badly. Amazing. I could train for years, I'd still never make the NBA. Does that mean I shouldn't exercise?
I don't know what argument you're making here. We've gone from humanity as an array of mewling stimuli-buckets, buffeted around by forces they can't influence, much less control, to "well they can but not equally" (which would be news if I'd never encountered a single other human.)
If I can't keep quiet at church, that's bad behavior. If someone with severe autism can't keep quiet at church, it's almost certainly a manifestation of their illness. That's why it's an illness. That's why I'm expected to be quiet and the autistic isn't.
Eh, just going by the obesity epidemic in America and the inability of the diet industry to curtail it for decades, something else is going on. As more and more people get to be obese, I find it hard to believe that we're finding the part of the population with such low willpower that going on a diet is 5% effective long term.
Environmental factors (I've seen plastics mentioned, no idea what the truth is), portion sizes, the normalization of snacking, increasingly sedentary lifestyles... there's an absolute ton going on and even motivated individuals will find it harder now than they would have done before WW2, to say nothing of the agricultural age. I'm not saying that a lot of people, predisposed to liking Doritos and their couch, don't face huge, demoralizing battles to lose weight or get fit. They obviously do. What I'm saying is that there is an expectation that people don't grow to six hundred pounds even if their internal stimuli would pull them in such a direction.
Thank you for this. I always appreciate your candor about this particular topic, mostly because I've been relatively unexposed to mental illness in my life and your writings often help enlighten me.
One thing I wanted to comment on is this little nugget: "To live without certainty." It seems fairly benign to me personally, but I've found a lot of people are either afraid or otherwise unwilling to do this very thing. I feel like lots of people can't function very well without certainty in their lives.
The chattering class has gone from arm chair quarterbacks to lemonade stand psychiatrists.
Lucy Van Pelt has gone mainstream without the charm and pragmatism Charles Shultz gave their cartoon section predecessor. Why anyone gives these self-important sooth-sayers a moment’s notice or credence is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
Thoughtful treatise of a difficult subject, Mr. deBoer, and I appreciate your sharing it!
People need to assign moral, and ideally criminal, culpability when bad things happen. But theyvhave a hand time squaring that with the idea that sometimes it is just that the person's brain is malfunctioning. So it's easier to just deny that a malfunctioning brain't can make you do bad things.
Also, not all people with X do this so X can't cause this is laughably bad logic, especially when X is an very broad category.
Humans in the West highly prize victim status, even to the point where they cultivate their own victimhood and that of those around them. This is allows the cultivator to bask in the reflected glory of the victim, and also affords opportunities for moral preening, by showing one's affirmation of right sort of victim.
At the same time, some victim categories are more equal than others. Humans use up inordinate amounts of time assigning relative weights to victim categories, i.e., burning questions such as "is a three headed alcoholic white cishet lesbian worth more Wokemon points than a bisexual male native-identified two spirit furry?"
Well said. I read through the linked article and it's frustrating that there's no accommodation made for mental illness as a contributing factor: either it explains none of Kanye's actions or all of them.
The reflexive social media mantra of “mental illness doesn’t generate bigotry” is utterly disconnected from how every Jew I know has processed these events. Which is basically, “Oh look, Kanye’s crazy ass is rambling about the Jews. Should’ve listened to that Jewish doctor and taken his meds.”
Yair Rosenberg’s take was best: Sometimes people with psychiatric conditions get paranoid and conspiratorial, and when they do, it’s easier to latch onto a conspiratorial template that’s been around for thousands of years than invent your own conspiracy about, say, the Amish or Copts or a cabal of personal trainers. So of COURSE his mental illness is relevant and of COURSE societal antisemitism is also relevant. If you can’t acknowledge that, you’re neither a friend to the mentally ill nor the Jews.
Gotcha. I didn’t mean to imply that Kanye shouldn’t face consequences. I don’t think it’s healthy to have such a public figure spouting nonsensical bigotry like this and have no problem with his cancellation, especially as he digs ever deeper. If he meds up and apologizes, I’ll give him a fair hearing. I just meant that “crazy person ranting about Jews” is not exactly a novel event and is obviously connected to both the crazy and the persistent allure of blaming all your problems on the Jews.
There's something of a problem where, for instance, Kanye is obviously crazy, but now that it's Kanye, Kyrie, and Chapelle rather than just Kanye, people are getting the impression that crazy bullshit like "Jews have already replaced us and we are the real Jews" is merely an alternate opinion on a matter not settled by mere facts.
It's interesting. As far as I can tell, what is driving all this is the sentiment "Bigotry is the gravest of mortals sins that must never be excused by anything."
I don't think so. I think it's that claiming a mental illness because it makes you cool at the rich kids' table is a lot harder to put over if having a mental illness is something with significant, and more to the point significantly embarrassing, potential drawbacks. Hard to feel special if suddenly everybody's side-eyeing you, wondering when you're going to start spouting this month's flavor of Qanon.
You can be as bigoted as you like in this country as long as you select your target appropriately. Kanye isn't being dispossessed of his career for bigotry. He's being dispossessed because he criticized the Jews, which is a mere subcategory of bigotry.
Certainly bigotry against "oppressors" is actively encouraged, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Kanye could have gotten away with a little antisemitism a la Farrakhan if it wasn't for all of his other MAGA transgressions. Similar with Kyrie Irving--if he was just a BLM darling people would be defending his latest hotep antisemitic nonsense, but his vaccine opposition has put him in apostate territory.
Don’t forget the transitivity of social just politics either. Anyone who still enjoys Kanye’s music or uncle Drew’s badass balling is now a maga antisemite too.
This seems like the most obvious point, but it gets missed over and over again: profound mental illness reacts to the culture around it. There's a reason why Ypsilanti State Hospital had three Christs at once, but no Buddhas.
Reminds me of a study looking at auditory hallucinations among schizophrenics in USA, India, and Ghana. While the hallucinations are a hallmark of the illness, in the USA they are much more violent where as in India and Ghana they are friendlier and patients develop relationships with them.
This resonated with me. Anyone who has ever befriended or loved someone with a severe mental illness will know exactly what you mean. It's terrible, debilitating, life ruining stuff that doesn't care one iota about social mores or the dictums of political correctness.
similarly, the guy that attacked paul pelosi was also severely mentally ill. the glib version of this was "read the dude's blog, he's cuckoo for cocoa puffs" while the serious version was "the journalists that tracked down his friends and family." like yeah, he had qanon on there, but he's had basically every conceivable conspiracy theory that's happened over the course of his entire life on there, that's just the most recent one to have occured
I already see bluechecks desperate to blame the attack on conservatives / Trump. Aaron Ruper is one example. Tim Wise did a whole thread on how right-wing ideology appeals to people with paranoid schizophrenia--on purpose! He said: "what makes MAGA especially dangerous is how it weaponizes mental illness and emotional disturbance for political ends. They know exactly what they are doing"
Right, this was the EXACT plan. Provoke people with mental illness to carry out attacks such as bludgeoning Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer. ~~They know exactly what they are doing. ~~
Nobody with any connection to reality would ever conceive of this as a good plan. I'm astounded that anybody could seriously propose this with a straight face.
Nobody has the organizational skills to pull this off. It's completely insane. The idiots who are seriously proposing that this is a devious plot by the political right are revealing more about themselves than their opposition.
Maybe it’s not the exact plan, but it is an inevitable consequence of the plan. If former Fox News employees are to be believed, the strategy Roger Ailes pursued was explicitly called “riling up the crazies.” The right wing in this country is accountable to its more extreme elements in a way that the left wing, for better or worse, is not.
I think Tim Wise is way off base on this (and on many things). That said, I've read from reputable sources that hate groups prey on mentally ill youth and on autistic young gamers. That does sound plausible to me, but hate groups and MAGA are far from synonymous (outside of Tim Wise's mind).
Chris Rock had a great set after Columbine, mocking the elaborate explanations of bullying and Marilyn Manson and generally peoples tendency to project their own neuroses onto a big event. “Whatever happened to crazy? You can’t just be crazy no more?”
"She quotes psychiatry resident Amanda Joy Calhoun as saying, 'Many people exist who have mental illnesses and are not racist or offensive. I work with many of them.'
This is no less stupid than saying "many cats are grey, therefore no cats are orange." If her grasp of elementary logic is that bad, every educational institution that accredited her should probably be bulldozed, starting with her elementary school. What an idiot.
But remember, if you question the medical establishment's response to COVID, you're a science denier.
I genuinely believe that if you do the directional opposite of what media doctors say, you'll lead a happier, healthier life than if you "follow the science" (as dictated by rent-a-quote "psychiatry residents" like Amanda Joy Calhoun.)
Insert any “I’m X identity / I know someone who’s X identity, therefore X” argument here. It’s absurd how willing people are to scapegoat others for their own irrationality.
Part of me wonders if that quote was intentionally taken out of context. Perhaps Dr. Calhoun said that right before explaining that many people with mental illness can say terrible things, but the next bit was cut out.
If you're an educated person, as Dr. Calhoun is by definition, you at this point need to understand that anything you say to any journalist will be mangled for whatever reason they see fit. (This is why never talking to journalists is an excellent policy.) If she failed to structure her words appropriately that's on her as much as it is the journalist.
Well, this is all speculation. I just thought the wording seemed so suspect that in my mind I saw it that way.
Anyway, I think there are limits to what one would expect. In this case, we'd be assuming she said "X is not always true, but there are times when it is," and that was quoted as "X is not always true" with the implication that was X was always false. That would be less "out of context" and more "blatant misquote," tantamount to quoting "X is not true" as "X is ... true".
To hell with an institution; these people deserve real ADHD. Not in the sense of like, "I have trouble focusing sometimes when I have to do boring work I don't like, and I really enjoy amphetamines". In the sense of being basically unable to manage the fundamental necessities of life without medication, and basically unable to enjoy much of anything about living with medication - constantly forced to choose, and to pay a hard cost no matter the choice.
That's not me. It's maybe the only man I've really ever fallen in love with, who I can't be with because that's a kind of life it turns out I can't handle. In a year that life drove me half crazy and nearly ruined my finances, because I couldn't bring myself to leave for what, sensibly, was far longer than it should have taken me. Love is a hell of a drug. And even at that I can't complain, because when it got too much I could leave. He doesn't have that liberty. We both wish he did.
It's old-fashioned of me, I know, and perhaps a bit cruel, to wish that people who regard mental illness as no more than a delightful eccentricity - something they can claim as a shiny bauble to decorate an identity, and use their privilege to define as just what they please for themselves, no more and no less - should have to spend a while living with the reality of it, the better to understand what it truly can do to people. To understand that it's more than, and worse than, a shiny bauble with which to decorate an identity, and a meaningless football in the social and political discourse of an evanescent historical moment.
Old-fashioned and cruel it may be, but I wish that for them anyway. Maybe it'd give them some basis for empathy. I can't imagine what else would.
You can certainly point to some very weird, some very wrong, and very distasteful things that Kanye has said about the Jewish people, but the basic claims that they're wildly over represented in the upper echelons of the rap and hip hop industries, and that if someone makes note of this they'll be punished, isn't a wild conspiracy theory but 100% correct, and would be correct regardless of Kanye's mental illnesses and their prompting him to believe and say certain things. In fact the negative consequences of his saying them seem not to have been borne by society or any subset thereof, but instead solely by Kanye himself.
Is that true? Genuine question, because I pay exactly zero attention to the upper echelons (or any echelon, actually) of the rap and hip hop industries. Is there a lot of antisemitism?
It is true that Jewish people are very heavily overrepresented, per head of population, in the upper reaches of the music industry in general and the west coast music industry in particular, of which rap and hip hop is a major part. (Interestingly, this is _slightly_ less true of East Coast hip hop, but one notable exception is Def Jam, which was founded by Rick Rubin, and became a key player in hip hop after Russell Simmons joined him. Def Jam, of course, was Kanye's label for most of his career.)
This needn't necessarily be a conspiracy, nor anything evil or shameful. In much of this country the motel industry is run by people of Gujurati origin. Japanese restaurants in the US tend to be owned by Koreans. Italians, famously, used to dominate the Black hair and beauty goods business. Oil belongs to WASPs, or at least used to. The difference, so far as I can tell, is that you can talk about these industries and the overrepresentation in them and be judged on the merits of what you say, but regardless of the context in which you raise Jewish overrepresentation in music, your sole motivation must be your deep and abiding anti-semitism, and as such the topic is completely off-limits for conversation in a way that, say, the composition of gym owners is not.
This is not my saying that people who raise the issue *aren't* capable of antisemitism. If you go on a hip hop forum like The Coli now, you will see plenty of it, but also plenty of people - far more people - disagreeing with it. To answer your last question: I'd say there is widespread confusion and disbelief first and foremost, with some antisemitism mixed in.
(I should add that most - but not all - of the regular commenters there are vehemently anti-Kanye because of his comments about slavery and white lives, and are not well-disposed towards his anti-semitism for that reason. That is, he's not endeared himself to these serious hip hop fans, and most aren't interested in his views on Jewish people for that reason. With that said, there are some exceptions, and there are also people who made similar observations before Kanye did.)
Ok, but he wasn’t out there making neutral factual assertions. He believes there’s a nefarious Jewish agenda being pushed by these people. Otherwise, he should just identify the specific individuals he believes have wronged him and explain what they did. There’s absolutely no reason to reference their Jewishness at all.
In this country you can - in fact, are expected to - speak about Whiteness and White people as a bloc, to speak about Black lives as a bloc, to speak about the Latino vote as a bloc. We live in a society of ethnic and racial divisions, and these are referred to constantly, day in, day out, and we all do it all the time without thinking. It is singularly and only when someone makes assertions or offers opinions - no matter how misguided they may be - about Jewish people that we have to pretend that this isn't a group, that the group doesn't have certain power qua its group status, and that it comprises wholly atomized individuals who have absolutely no relation to each other, and who in fact don't have any connection to each other in any way and don't know they exist.
It's completely stupid and anyone who's not a child can see the glaring contradiction here. Did Kanye say objectionable things? Absolutely, 100%. Did the group about whom he said objectionable things not act, as a group, to immediately punish him? Absolutely, 100%. But we are allowed to notice only the former and not the latter. Again, childish stuff.
So all Jews (in the music/media industry?) coordinated the punishment of Kanye West? If so, we should be glad of Ye exposing their power. Or we could refrain from making blanket statements about members of a so-called community merely because they happen to share largely irrelevant genetic/cultural set of traits.
You can tell that people have never thought seriously about this, and that they just know this is a third rail that no decent person would ever go near, by the utter weakness of their arguments, like the ones you present here. If you never use your legs they'll waste away; if you never engage your critical faculties on this point you'll blurt out this kind of absolute rubbish that you post here.
You're making two different claims now, neither of which I agree with and neither of which make any sense:
1) that all Jews are somehow involved in this. Why would that be *necessary*, much less likely? Walk me through a case in which a signed declaration on the part of every member of a given population is *necessary* for the dynamic I'm describing to be true.
2) that anyone who punishes Kanye is Jewish (doubly ludicrous). Anti-semitism is an ugly trait. Major brands want to shy away from ugly traits and ugly controversies at all costs. "Brand safety" is the order of the day. Why would it be necessary for someone to be Jewish to condemn anti-semitism?
To answer your question: no. Of course it's not coordinated. In fact I believe hardly anything is coordinated ever; I regard it as a complicating step that usually fails parsimony, which is why I don't go in for most conspiracy theories. I do go in for some. Some things are coordinated. Most aren't. This isn't.
Instead I look at confluences of shared goals and shared creeds, and shared values, that don't necessitate everyone getting together in a smoke-filled room. If I'm a huge fan of classical music and my city wants to shut down its symphony orchestra, I don't need to coordinate with other fans to sign a petition. (Being organized would help, of course, and being part of an interest group of music enthusiasts would allow us to be better at furthering our goals, but it's by no means a prerequisite.) If I work for the CDC, I'm probably going to go along with conventional wisdom about COVID and I'm probably not going to be a homeopath. If I work for the NRA I probably like guns, or at the very least gun rights, or if I don't I know to keep quiet about it.
You'll say, but these are opt-in groups based on interests, with clear mission statements. Correct: such groups will both select for people who are interested in these things, and then once selected, most peoples' natural impulse is to toe the line. And this is the exact same dynamic that we see within societal cleavages in diverse societies, even within non-opt-in groups. Community mores are important. Expectations are important. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Dissent is difficult. Most people don't need to be told this. It doesn't usually have to be said. It perpetuates.
The argument I'm making, then, doesn't depend on a deliberate coordination. It depends on shared objectives (keeping the symphony alive) and shared values (prizing classical music to the extent that we regard it as a public good in our city.)
You call American Jewry a "so-called" community. This is so absurdly dishonest as to be laughable. Jews are a self-identified group, or rather group of groups: most are Ashkenazi in the US, of course, but not all, and there is huge variance within different groups of Ashkenazim, and then there is the religious-secular divide as well. But you can't call variance evidence of a lack of community identification, otherwise there wouldn't be any communities.
We know the following about Jewish people in the US *in the aggregate*: they tend to be socially liberal, they tend to be affluent, they tend to have excellent educational attainment and thrive in professional environments. We know them to be pro-Israel.
(You're probably typing "but what about Kiryas Joel and Satmar?!" Stop. Engage brain. Again, shared ethoses within large groups don't necessitate monocultures. I'm talking about the aggregate.)
And we also know - by using our eyes and ears - that for very understandable reasons they are concerned about anti-semitism, and that anti-semitism isn't tolerated in the public square, and - as we're seeing now - they believe no decent person would do business with an anti-semite, and so the businesses in which Jewish people are heavily represented will not tolerate the likes of Kanye in their midst.
This doesn't necessitate "all Jews", or "all Jews" in an industry being in lockstep, nor having huge disagreements, nor having massively different worldviews, nor all the other things that make us individuals. But communities don't take on the characteristics of their exceptions. At every Trump rally you'll see, front and center, several Black people in prime seats. Yet it would be utterly nonsensical to claim, based on this, that we can't call Black people *in the aggregate* Democratic voters. You can find a big game hunter who's a vegetarian. It would be absurd, based on this, to say that big game hunters are *in the aggregate* against eating meat.
Similarly you can find Jewish people who hold all sorts of opinions, including about peoples' right to speak freely - however wrongly, however ill-informed, however stupid - about the Jewish people. It would, however, be utterly nonsensical to claim *in the aggregate* that this is false: people who criticize Jews in the music industry quickly find themselves unemployed in that industry and boycotted commercially elsewhere, and that while this certainly can happen in the case of, say, anti-Black racism, it happens far more reliably and with far greater consequences when Jews are the ones being criticized.
And, as I said, it is only, solely, purely, uniquely in the case of Jews that you can't point this out, unless you are yourself an anti-semite, or attributing it to a conspiracy of every Jewish person ever, or some other complete rubbish.
Another annoying quality of modern western thought is romanticism, and with it, the tendency to glamorize mental illness.
Cats know better.
One major change is you wouldn’t have people diagnosing themselves or seeking diagnosis as a way to signal their status/intersectional credentials. If (specifically young) people understood mental illness as the complex and often ugly thing that it is they wouldn’t glorify it so much. If you understand that mental illness can cause the type of irrational thinking that manifests in bigotry, then you probably wouldn’t have Kanye west on your podcast in hopes that you can “reason” with him and doing so would be as frowned upon as putting someone with a torn club foot on American Ninja Warrior. It would help us get less mad about the things Kanye says and have more compassion for him and his family. We would have better understanding of what mental illness is so that we can diagnose it better.
I can go on, but I think the implications to what Freddie is saying are actually really obvious.
Hmm I actually think you could be onto something lol. We are so annoyed “#loladhd” crowd that we feel the need to draw a straight line between them and the much more complicated high level issues regarding society and mental illness. We do this as a kind of defense mechanism by default because otherwise you’re just a petty old guy who thinks the kids are annoying, and no one wants to admit that lol. Kind of like people who compare the “pronouns” to Stalinism or w.e, it’s a lot more heroic to be opposing an evil tyrant than it is to admit you just think the idea of being trans is weird. Richard Hanania has an amazing article about this called “why I hate pronouns more than genocide” that I highly recommend regardless of politics.
So yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying here snd it probably wouldn’t change much for the people with actual serious mental illness. However I’d stand by that the current “#mentalhealth” discourse definitely has a lot of negative effects, specifically on kids and teens.
Ironically the DSM moved away from this kind of categorization when they got rid of Asperger's and High Functioning Autism designations.
Hasn't the categorization been flipped? Decades ago autism by default meant significant disability and Asperger's was designated for "high functioning' individuals. Now the default seems to be Asperger's while the author of the linked piece has to advocate for a new "profound" classification.
There's different levels to Autism in the DSM. Level 1 is high functioning / Asperger's, Level 3 would be profound.
You’re right Slaw, and I suspect it’s due to high functioning individuals having way more visibility in productive society. I completely disagree with the choice to remove the Asperger’s designation from DSM. I don’t think it has been good for anyone, and it causes a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.
I remember once, before I moved to the US, seeing a woman pushing a boy in a wheelchair. I say "seeing" - what actually happened is I heard the screaming first. This was in a wide open city square. The woman pushing her son (I assume) across it, and him just screaming to the heavens. This was in a huge plaza with hundreds of busy shoppers and tourists around, and it was loud enough then. God alone knows what it would have been like inside a small house. I'd never encountered profound autism before then (my friend told me that's probably what the kid had), so I went home and read up on it. It's utterly, utterly heartbreaking, the kind of thing that wrecks families. Autism being a spectrum, this is obviously the very severe end, but it puts the lie to the idea that it's a cuddly condition.
I have two cousins with, I guess, "severe autism." One is 34, the other 30, though I haven't seen them in years due to some family drama after their father (my mom's brother) died. Neither can speak or write more than a few words, and need help with basic functions of life, like brushing their teeth. They both were kept in public school until they were too old to be allowed, and they'll never be able to hold down a job. AFAIK neither had any friends, and I doubt any romantic connections. My one cousin was so prone to escaping the house (sans shoes, in the winter, in the dark, and unable to swim but attracted to moving bodies of water) that my grandparents had to change the locks in their house so all exterior doors could be locked from the inside, and someone had to carry the keys around on their arm when they visited. His brother is prone to hitting himself in the head when agitated (often, especially when people are talking loudly).
Just a wildly, wildly different experience than what Autism Twitter describes.
"Severe" is an imprecise statement on my part. I simply don't know what it's called. All I know is, people on the spectrum can live very happy and fulfilled lives, and their families the same, if they receive some accommodation. Other people, on the other extreme of the spectrum... I don't know what happiness means for them as individuals, but I do know that their condition presents an immense challenge for their families and as such I regard it as a very sad condition that, all else being equal, I would like people not to have. Many autistic people take offence at this opinion, but it's one that I stand by: at its worst, it's a condition that I think the individuals who have it, would be better off if they did not have it.
And that's why it's considered a disability!
I have Aspergers and have friends with profoundly Autistic children.
One is something that can be ameliorated, causes substantial challenges, but isn't incompatible with a happy, productive, independent life.
The other is a life sucking nightmare for all involved that is not social media or real world cute, is not mildly life changing, and is not something that current accommodations measurably helps...
Modern social consciousness may help those with very mild Aspergers (sometimes) but offers little and/or is counterproductive for those further along the Spectrum.
The decision to kill the Aspergers category was done by the American Psychological/Psychiatric Society at an annual meeting. Science by vote is not science. The whole DSM was developed this way...
It can be morally correct that Kanye West suffered professional consequences for his behavior AND factually correct that this behavior was caused by his mental illness. That's why mental illness is an illness: because it can cause negative consequences for you!
If you're operating on materialist priors (which I think most people have internalized in the U.S. to some degree, particularly elites) I really don't see anywhere for culpability at all. There's your brain structure, and then there's outside stimuli, and nowhere is there a ghost in the machine to create free will. Some people have brain structures far outside of the norm, where they will have very atypical responses to typical stimuli. But even people who are completely "normal" folks who do bad things - like say someone who kills their spouse in a fit of jealous rage - are ultimately just living out the interaction between their neural states and the world around them.
That isn't to say that I don't think having the illusion of free will might be adaptive for a society as a whole. It's also not to say that there aren't some people who - regardless of culpability - need to be imprisoned for the safety of others. But the whole idea of assigning (or absolving) culpability just seems pointless to me. We have to deal with actions, not with intent.
I completely take your point. In a technical sense it's correct, based on those priors. But it's a disastrous social construct. Without the power of shame/blame to moderate it, there is ample - overwhelming - evidence - that humans can and will behave extremely badly. So it's a very bad idea to normalize that view. The idea of personal responsibility is the foundation stone of social actions. Crypto and the idea of trustless trust notwithstanding.
Hence why I said it "might be adaptive." I think that free will is a useful construct even though it likely doesn't exist in an objective sense. Essentially all human concepts don't exist in the objective sense anyway.
My point was more that putting a hard/fast division between the mentally ill (who are not culpable for their actions) and everyone else (who is) is pretty arbitrary. Hell, many of the most heinous crimes are undertaken by psychopaths, who are usually seen as criminally culpable, but it has increasingly been shown have a different neural structure and even when identified in childhood cannot be "reformed." Do I think many need to be locked away for the benefit of others? Absolutely! But the reason they are as they are is clearly not their "fault."
I mean, I agree insofar as that punishment is a silly idea for justice. It should be about being an effective deterrence or simply locking someone up who is dangerous. But even if there is no free-will ghost in the machine, there is a serious illusion of free will. And the belief that we have agency certainly shapes our response to stimulus, even if we don’t actually have any. I think free will is one of those things we don’t currently have the capacity to understand, kind of like how we can’t find a deterministic model for quantum physics. Unless someone can point me to some perfectly accurate deterministic model of the brain and human consciousness, I’m going to split the difference and assume we have free will with some constraints.
This argument only holds if you believe that the individual has no ability - to say nothing of responsibility - to moderate or otherwise reconsider their stimuli. Cognitive behavioral therapy, among other things, allows people to rewire the way they respond to certain situations. Free will is a completely separate argument to the one you think you're making.
I concede that you can rewire the brain over time. Hell, it's been shown that certain occupations can cause changes to your neural structure. But that doesn't mean that the initial decision to undertake said path was one where any alternate outcome was possible.
It's just external stimuli all the way down, then. If that one butterfly hadn't flapped its wings, I would never have started drinking.
It's the responsibility of an individual to not eat eight bags of sugar a day, despite the positive stimuli derived therefrom, and it's the responsibility of society to equip the individual with a knowledge of healthy eating and to provide the means for everyone to have a nourishing diet.
I mean, to give one example of this though, lots of studies looking at how to get in shape have concluded that people who are more physically fit over a longer term are primarily so because of how they are wired, not willpower. They get more of a "runners high" out of exercise than the average person, and find unhealthy food less attractive. They are not engaged in self-mortification, they are following their bliss same as the rest of us, it's just their bliss is much more adaptive to a healthy lifestyle.
Yes, some people are naturally equipped to od some things well, and some things badly. Amazing. I could train for years, I'd still never make the NBA. Does that mean I shouldn't exercise?
I don't know what argument you're making here. We've gone from humanity as an array of mewling stimuli-buckets, buffeted around by forces they can't influence, much less control, to "well they can but not equally" (which would be news if I'd never encountered a single other human.)
If I can't keep quiet at church, that's bad behavior. If someone with severe autism can't keep quiet at church, it's almost certainly a manifestation of their illness. That's why it's an illness. That's why I'm expected to be quiet and the autistic isn't.
Eh, just going by the obesity epidemic in America and the inability of the diet industry to curtail it for decades, something else is going on. As more and more people get to be obese, I find it hard to believe that we're finding the part of the population with such low willpower that going on a diet is 5% effective long term.
Environmental factors (I've seen plastics mentioned, no idea what the truth is), portion sizes, the normalization of snacking, increasingly sedentary lifestyles... there's an absolute ton going on and even motivated individuals will find it harder now than they would have done before WW2, to say nothing of the agricultural age. I'm not saying that a lot of people, predisposed to liking Doritos and their couch, don't face huge, demoralizing battles to lose weight or get fit. They obviously do. What I'm saying is that there is an expectation that people don't grow to six hundred pounds even if their internal stimuli would pull them in such a direction.
Thank you for this. I always appreciate your candor about this particular topic, mostly because I've been relatively unexposed to mental illness in my life and your writings often help enlighten me.
One thing I wanted to comment on is this little nugget: "To live without certainty." It seems fairly benign to me personally, but I've found a lot of people are either afraid or otherwise unwilling to do this very thing. I feel like lots of people can't function very well without certainty in their lives.
The chattering class has gone from arm chair quarterbacks to lemonade stand psychiatrists.
Lucy Van Pelt has gone mainstream without the charm and pragmatism Charles Shultz gave their cartoon section predecessor. Why anyone gives these self-important sooth-sayers a moment’s notice or credence is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
Thoughtful treatise of a difficult subject, Mr. deBoer, and I appreciate your sharing it!
People need to assign moral, and ideally criminal, culpability when bad things happen. But theyvhave a hand time squaring that with the idea that sometimes it is just that the person's brain is malfunctioning. So it's easier to just deny that a malfunctioning brain't can make you do bad things.
Also, not all people with X do this so X can't cause this is laughably bad logic, especially when X is an very broad category.
Humans in the West highly prize victim status, even to the point where they cultivate their own victimhood and that of those around them. This is allows the cultivator to bask in the reflected glory of the victim, and also affords opportunities for moral preening, by showing one's affirmation of right sort of victim.
At the same time, some victim categories are more equal than others. Humans use up inordinate amounts of time assigning relative weights to victim categories, i.e., burning questions such as "is a three headed alcoholic white cishet lesbian worth more Wokemon points than a bisexual male native-identified two spirit furry?"
Well said. I read through the linked article and it's frustrating that there's no accommodation made for mental illness as a contributing factor: either it explains none of Kanye's actions or all of them.
The reflexive social media mantra of “mental illness doesn’t generate bigotry” is utterly disconnected from how every Jew I know has processed these events. Which is basically, “Oh look, Kanye’s crazy ass is rambling about the Jews. Should’ve listened to that Jewish doctor and taken his meds.”
Yair Rosenberg’s take was best: Sometimes people with psychiatric conditions get paranoid and conspiratorial, and when they do, it’s easier to latch onto a conspiratorial template that’s been around for thousands of years than invent your own conspiracy about, say, the Amish or Copts or a cabal of personal trainers. So of COURSE his mental illness is relevant and of COURSE societal antisemitism is also relevant. If you can’t acknowledge that, you’re neither a friend to the mentally ill nor the Jews.
Ah interesting. Do tell.
Gotcha. I didn’t mean to imply that Kanye shouldn’t face consequences. I don’t think it’s healthy to have such a public figure spouting nonsensical bigotry like this and have no problem with his cancellation, especially as he digs ever deeper. If he meds up and apologizes, I’ll give him a fair hearing. I just meant that “crazy person ranting about Jews” is not exactly a novel event and is obviously connected to both the crazy and the persistent allure of blaming all your problems on the Jews.
There's something of a problem where, for instance, Kanye is obviously crazy, but now that it's Kanye, Kyrie, and Chapelle rather than just Kanye, people are getting the impression that crazy bullshit like "Jews have already replaced us and we are the real Jews" is merely an alternate opinion on a matter not settled by mere facts.
It's interesting. As far as I can tell, what is driving all this is the sentiment "Bigotry is the gravest of mortals sins that must never be excused by anything."
I don't think so. I think it's that claiming a mental illness because it makes you cool at the rich kids' table is a lot harder to put over if having a mental illness is something with significant, and more to the point significantly embarrassing, potential drawbacks. Hard to feel special if suddenly everybody's side-eyeing you, wondering when you're going to start spouting this month's flavor of Qanon.
I think there is an element of both factors.
You can be as bigoted as you like in this country as long as you select your target appropriately. Kanye isn't being dispossessed of his career for bigotry. He's being dispossessed because he criticized the Jews, which is a mere subcategory of bigotry.
Certainly bigotry against "oppressors" is actively encouraged, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Kanye could have gotten away with a little antisemitism a la Farrakhan if it wasn't for all of his other MAGA transgressions. Similar with Kyrie Irving--if he was just a BLM darling people would be defending his latest hotep antisemitic nonsense, but his vaccine opposition has put him in apostate territory.
Don’t forget the transitivity of social just politics either. Anyone who still enjoys Kanye’s music or uncle Drew’s badass balling is now a maga antisemite too.
This seems like the most obvious point, but it gets missed over and over again: profound mental illness reacts to the culture around it. There's a reason why Ypsilanti State Hospital had three Christs at once, but no Buddhas.
Reminds me of a study looking at auditory hallucinations among schizophrenics in USA, India, and Ghana. While the hallucinations are a hallmark of the illness, in the USA they are much more violent where as in India and Ghana they are friendlier and patients develop relationships with them.
It's indeed mystifying that Kanye chose not to blow the lid on the Coptic dominance of the West Coast hip hop industry.
He's living in an Amish paradise...
A classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg
This resonated with me. Anyone who has ever befriended or loved someone with a severe mental illness will know exactly what you mean. It's terrible, debilitating, life ruining stuff that doesn't care one iota about social mores or the dictums of political correctness.
similarly, the guy that attacked paul pelosi was also severely mentally ill. the glib version of this was "read the dude's blog, he's cuckoo for cocoa puffs" while the serious version was "the journalists that tracked down his friends and family." like yeah, he had qanon on there, but he's had basically every conceivable conspiracy theory that's happened over the course of his entire life on there, that's just the most recent one to have occured
I already see bluechecks desperate to blame the attack on conservatives / Trump. Aaron Ruper is one example. Tim Wise did a whole thread on how right-wing ideology appeals to people with paranoid schizophrenia--on purpose! He said: "what makes MAGA especially dangerous is how it weaponizes mental illness and emotional disturbance for political ends. They know exactly what they are doing"
Right, this was the EXACT plan. Provoke people with mental illness to carry out attacks such as bludgeoning Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer. ~~They know exactly what they are doing. ~~
Nobody with any connection to reality would ever conceive of this as a good plan. I'm astounded that anybody could seriously propose this with a straight face.
Nobody has the organizational skills to pull this off. It's completely insane. The idiots who are seriously proposing that this is a devious plot by the political right are revealing more about themselves than their opposition.
Maybe it’s not the exact plan, but it is an inevitable consequence of the plan. If former Fox News employees are to be believed, the strategy Roger Ailes pursued was explicitly called “riling up the crazies.” The right wing in this country is accountable to its more extreme elements in a way that the left wing, for better or worse, is not.
I think Tim Wise is way off base on this (and on many things). That said, I've read from reputable sources that hate groups prey on mentally ill youth and on autistic young gamers. That does sound plausible to me, but hate groups and MAGA are far from synonymous (outside of Tim Wise's mind).
😉 He was a Canadian from Powel River who moved to Burkeley and got really into alternative lifestyles and drugs for two decades.
Snark - it's the first that is the most noteworthy for someone from BC...
Chris Rock had a great set after Columbine, mocking the elaborate explanations of bullying and Marilyn Manson and generally peoples tendency to project their own neuroses onto a big event. “Whatever happened to crazy? You can’t just be crazy no more?”
"She quotes psychiatry resident Amanda Joy Calhoun as saying, 'Many people exist who have mental illnesses and are not racist or offensive. I work with many of them.'
This is no less stupid than saying "many cats are grey, therefore no cats are orange." If her grasp of elementary logic is that bad, every educational institution that accredited her should probably be bulldozed, starting with her elementary school. What an idiot.
But remember, if you question the medical establishment's response to COVID, you're a science denier.
I genuinely believe that if you do the directional opposite of what media doctors say, you'll lead a happier, healthier life than if you "follow the science" (as dictated by rent-a-quote "psychiatry residents" like Amanda Joy Calhoun.)
Insert any “I’m X identity / I know someone who’s X identity, therefore X” argument here. It’s absurd how willing people are to scapegoat others for their own irrationality.
Part of me wonders if that quote was intentionally taken out of context. Perhaps Dr. Calhoun said that right before explaining that many people with mental illness can say terrible things, but the next bit was cut out.
I hope for her sake that it was.
If you're an educated person, as Dr. Calhoun is by definition, you at this point need to understand that anything you say to any journalist will be mangled for whatever reason they see fit. (This is why never talking to journalists is an excellent policy.) If she failed to structure her words appropriately that's on her as much as it is the journalist.
Well, this is all speculation. I just thought the wording seemed so suspect that in my mind I saw it that way.
Anyway, I think there are limits to what one would expect. In this case, we'd be assuming she said "X is not always true, but there are times when it is," and that was quoted as "X is not always true" with the implication that was X was always false. That would be less "out of context" and more "blatant misquote," tantamount to quoting "X is not true" as "X is ... true".
To hell with an institution; these people deserve real ADHD. Not in the sense of like, "I have trouble focusing sometimes when I have to do boring work I don't like, and I really enjoy amphetamines". In the sense of being basically unable to manage the fundamental necessities of life without medication, and basically unable to enjoy much of anything about living with medication - constantly forced to choose, and to pay a hard cost no matter the choice.
That's not me. It's maybe the only man I've really ever fallen in love with, who I can't be with because that's a kind of life it turns out I can't handle. In a year that life drove me half crazy and nearly ruined my finances, because I couldn't bring myself to leave for what, sensibly, was far longer than it should have taken me. Love is a hell of a drug. And even at that I can't complain, because when it got too much I could leave. He doesn't have that liberty. We both wish he did.
It's old-fashioned of me, I know, and perhaps a bit cruel, to wish that people who regard mental illness as no more than a delightful eccentricity - something they can claim as a shiny bauble to decorate an identity, and use their privilege to define as just what they please for themselves, no more and no less - should have to spend a while living with the reality of it, the better to understand what it truly can do to people. To understand that it's more than, and worse than, a shiny bauble with which to decorate an identity, and a meaningless football in the social and political discourse of an evanescent historical moment.
Old-fashioned and cruel it may be, but I wish that for them anyway. Maybe it'd give them some basis for empathy. I can't imagine what else would.
What plan?
You can certainly point to some very weird, some very wrong, and very distasteful things that Kanye has said about the Jewish people, but the basic claims that they're wildly over represented in the upper echelons of the rap and hip hop industries, and that if someone makes note of this they'll be punished, isn't a wild conspiracy theory but 100% correct, and would be correct regardless of Kanye's mental illnesses and their prompting him to believe and say certain things. In fact the negative consequences of his saying them seem not to have been borne by society or any subset thereof, but instead solely by Kanye himself.
Is that true? Genuine question, because I pay exactly zero attention to the upper echelons (or any echelon, actually) of the rap and hip hop industries. Is there a lot of antisemitism?
It is true that Jewish people are very heavily overrepresented, per head of population, in the upper reaches of the music industry in general and the west coast music industry in particular, of which rap and hip hop is a major part. (Interestingly, this is _slightly_ less true of East Coast hip hop, but one notable exception is Def Jam, which was founded by Rick Rubin, and became a key player in hip hop after Russell Simmons joined him. Def Jam, of course, was Kanye's label for most of his career.)
This needn't necessarily be a conspiracy, nor anything evil or shameful. In much of this country the motel industry is run by people of Gujurati origin. Japanese restaurants in the US tend to be owned by Koreans. Italians, famously, used to dominate the Black hair and beauty goods business. Oil belongs to WASPs, or at least used to. The difference, so far as I can tell, is that you can talk about these industries and the overrepresentation in them and be judged on the merits of what you say, but regardless of the context in which you raise Jewish overrepresentation in music, your sole motivation must be your deep and abiding anti-semitism, and as such the topic is completely off-limits for conversation in a way that, say, the composition of gym owners is not.
This is not my saying that people who raise the issue *aren't* capable of antisemitism. If you go on a hip hop forum like The Coli now, you will see plenty of it, but also plenty of people - far more people - disagreeing with it. To answer your last question: I'd say there is widespread confusion and disbelief first and foremost, with some antisemitism mixed in.
(I should add that most - but not all - of the regular commenters there are vehemently anti-Kanye because of his comments about slavery and white lives, and are not well-disposed towards his anti-semitism for that reason. That is, he's not endeared himself to these serious hip hop fans, and most aren't interested in his views on Jewish people for that reason. With that said, there are some exceptions, and there are also people who made similar observations before Kanye did.)
Thanks!
Ok, but he wasn’t out there making neutral factual assertions. He believes there’s a nefarious Jewish agenda being pushed by these people. Otherwise, he should just identify the specific individuals he believes have wronged him and explain what they did. There’s absolutely no reason to reference their Jewishness at all.
In this country you can - in fact, are expected to - speak about Whiteness and White people as a bloc, to speak about Black lives as a bloc, to speak about the Latino vote as a bloc. We live in a society of ethnic and racial divisions, and these are referred to constantly, day in, day out, and we all do it all the time without thinking. It is singularly and only when someone makes assertions or offers opinions - no matter how misguided they may be - about Jewish people that we have to pretend that this isn't a group, that the group doesn't have certain power qua its group status, and that it comprises wholly atomized individuals who have absolutely no relation to each other, and who in fact don't have any connection to each other in any way and don't know they exist.
It's completely stupid and anyone who's not a child can see the glaring contradiction here. Did Kanye say objectionable things? Absolutely, 100%. Did the group about whom he said objectionable things not act, as a group, to immediately punish him? Absolutely, 100%. But we are allowed to notice only the former and not the latter. Again, childish stuff.
So all Jews (in the music/media industry?) coordinated the punishment of Kanye West? If so, we should be glad of Ye exposing their power. Or we could refrain from making blanket statements about members of a so-called community merely because they happen to share largely irrelevant genetic/cultural set of traits.
Yeah agreed, I don't believe "all the jews" coordinated to punish Ye. Adidas and the Gap did the same. Run by Jews, I guess.
You can tell that people have never thought seriously about this, and that they just know this is a third rail that no decent person would ever go near, by the utter weakness of their arguments, like the ones you present here. If you never use your legs they'll waste away; if you never engage your critical faculties on this point you'll blurt out this kind of absolute rubbish that you post here.
You're making two different claims now, neither of which I agree with and neither of which make any sense:
1) that all Jews are somehow involved in this. Why would that be *necessary*, much less likely? Walk me through a case in which a signed declaration on the part of every member of a given population is *necessary* for the dynamic I'm describing to be true.
2) that anyone who punishes Kanye is Jewish (doubly ludicrous). Anti-semitism is an ugly trait. Major brands want to shy away from ugly traits and ugly controversies at all costs. "Brand safety" is the order of the day. Why would it be necessary for someone to be Jewish to condemn anti-semitism?
To answer your question: no. Of course it's not coordinated. In fact I believe hardly anything is coordinated ever; I regard it as a complicating step that usually fails parsimony, which is why I don't go in for most conspiracy theories. I do go in for some. Some things are coordinated. Most aren't. This isn't.
Instead I look at confluences of shared goals and shared creeds, and shared values, that don't necessitate everyone getting together in a smoke-filled room. If I'm a huge fan of classical music and my city wants to shut down its symphony orchestra, I don't need to coordinate with other fans to sign a petition. (Being organized would help, of course, and being part of an interest group of music enthusiasts would allow us to be better at furthering our goals, but it's by no means a prerequisite.) If I work for the CDC, I'm probably going to go along with conventional wisdom about COVID and I'm probably not going to be a homeopath. If I work for the NRA I probably like guns, or at the very least gun rights, or if I don't I know to keep quiet about it.
You'll say, but these are opt-in groups based on interests, with clear mission statements. Correct: such groups will both select for people who are interested in these things, and then once selected, most peoples' natural impulse is to toe the line. And this is the exact same dynamic that we see within societal cleavages in diverse societies, even within non-opt-in groups. Community mores are important. Expectations are important. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Dissent is difficult. Most people don't need to be told this. It doesn't usually have to be said. It perpetuates.
The argument I'm making, then, doesn't depend on a deliberate coordination. It depends on shared objectives (keeping the symphony alive) and shared values (prizing classical music to the extent that we regard it as a public good in our city.)
You call American Jewry a "so-called" community. This is so absurdly dishonest as to be laughable. Jews are a self-identified group, or rather group of groups: most are Ashkenazi in the US, of course, but not all, and there is huge variance within different groups of Ashkenazim, and then there is the religious-secular divide as well. But you can't call variance evidence of a lack of community identification, otherwise there wouldn't be any communities.
We know the following about Jewish people in the US *in the aggregate*: they tend to be socially liberal, they tend to be affluent, they tend to have excellent educational attainment and thrive in professional environments. We know them to be pro-Israel.
(You're probably typing "but what about Kiryas Joel and Satmar?!" Stop. Engage brain. Again, shared ethoses within large groups don't necessitate monocultures. I'm talking about the aggregate.)
And we also know - by using our eyes and ears - that for very understandable reasons they are concerned about anti-semitism, and that anti-semitism isn't tolerated in the public square, and - as we're seeing now - they believe no decent person would do business with an anti-semite, and so the businesses in which Jewish people are heavily represented will not tolerate the likes of Kanye in their midst.
This doesn't necessitate "all Jews", or "all Jews" in an industry being in lockstep, nor having huge disagreements, nor having massively different worldviews, nor all the other things that make us individuals. But communities don't take on the characteristics of their exceptions. At every Trump rally you'll see, front and center, several Black people in prime seats. Yet it would be utterly nonsensical to claim, based on this, that we can't call Black people *in the aggregate* Democratic voters. You can find a big game hunter who's a vegetarian. It would be absurd, based on this, to say that big game hunters are *in the aggregate* against eating meat.
Similarly you can find Jewish people who hold all sorts of opinions, including about peoples' right to speak freely - however wrongly, however ill-informed, however stupid - about the Jewish people. It would, however, be utterly nonsensical to claim *in the aggregate* that this is false: people who criticize Jews in the music industry quickly find themselves unemployed in that industry and boycotted commercially elsewhere, and that while this certainly can happen in the case of, say, anti-Black racism, it happens far more reliably and with far greater consequences when Jews are the ones being criticized.
And, as I said, it is only, solely, purely, uniquely in the case of Jews that you can't point this out, unless you are yourself an anti-semite, or attributing it to a conspiracy of every Jewish person ever, or some other complete rubbish.